Life in Kenya is not a rerun from a dramatic, possibly staged television series on the savannah. Looking out the van window, I would fail to hear a British narrator and urgent instrumentation over the trumpeting of an elephant herd or the galloping of Grant’s gazelles. When six hyenas bombarded a pack of African wild dogs, running off with their mangled carcass, all I heard were the breathy curses of my classmates.
For such a remote wilderness, the fast paced lifestyle is remarkable. Whenever we would receive a radio alert about a rare, endangered, or elusive animal, we would dash to the van and drive. With only thin dust roads showered with pebbles, speeding is safest. Swerving off into the brush after an aardvark or honey badger hardly impacts our ride.
That night, I had just finished a pre-dinner bucket shower, using a friend’s leftover hot water. Upon emerging from the hut, I noticed the van’s headlights on. Afraid I had forgotten about a scheduled game drive, I grabbed my fleece jacket and hurried into the van, with my professor, Dustin Rubenstein, at the wheel. The radio call was for wild dogs, which seemed dull to me. Dogs are not exotic mammals, and it is not surprising that the ones in Kenya would be wild. But I decided to give them a chance, so I zippered up my jacket and climbed up to the crevice between the van’s trunk and the raised safari roof.
Beyond the three electrified fences that contain the campground, Mpala is indistinguishable. Locations and directions require careful consideration, such as “by the stagnant pool where hippos sometimes bathe,” “that place where we saw the lion yesterday” or “near the abandoned air strip”. But animals move. This came as a surprise to me since I had been treating Kenya like a zoo. I travelled to the equator line to observe animals, most of which I could gaze at from behind double paned glass. At a zoo, a desire to observe wild dogs would lead me down a nubby carpet to the wild dog area. Kenya has no wild dog area.
The sunlight fades fast on the equator. Brightness does not linger in the clouds; it shifts from a clear white to muted gold to dusty red to black. As the atmosphere transitioned from gold to red, illuminating the dust particles that will soon adhere to my skin, we began shouting out the window at passing drivers, “Excuse me, have you seen a pack of wild dogs around here?” Some shook their heads, probably too engrossed in their research niche to worry themselves with another species, and others emphatically carved a route with their arm and urged us to hurry.
Dusk turned to night, and we took turns scanning the roadsides with a handheld spotlight. Since this meant that we could only see one side at a time, our paced slowed considerably as we surveyed the ranch. The spotlight danced as the van clambered over pebbles. Sitting on the roof disqualified me from holding the heavy spotlight and I was thankful for the lack of responsibility. The dogs could be on the left with the shaky circle of light on the right and we would keep driving forward.
Luckily this fact was inconsequential because the van’s headlights climbed the body of a wild dog from paw to rounded ear. Too stunned to react, Dr. Rubenstein did not stop the van until the whole pack felt the heat of the glare. A limbless crimson dik dik carcass lay glistening in the road. Six wild dogs, resembling regal German shepards with long, copper fur spotted with black and grey, gnawed on the dik dik torso, while thirty waited behind them eagerly. The motor, purring like a cheetah, did not faze the grazers but the vigilant ones turned their heads away from the fracas.
In that instant, six hyenas ransacked the scene with one, flanked by an entourage, swiftly grabbing the carcass in its jaw and rushing into the nearby bush. The wild dogs, so accustomed to the warm treat, looked at the bush, bewildered. A few nosed the road, coating their bloody snouts in dust. Some ran to the edge of the bush, barking. One snarl from a hidden hyena sent the whole wild dog pack trotting down the road.
The headlights and spotlight soon revealed nothing more than mika-speckled rocks. I heard bones cracking somewhere to the left of the van, but the verdant shrubbery concealed the ugly, snarly faces of the victors. The sound of shattering ribs verified the bandits as hyenas, since their teeth uniquely allow them to pulverize bone. Hyena feces are distinctly white in color as a result of this trait.
Where did the hyenas come from and how long had they been there? It seemed that we were the missing link to their master plan. We made it known to the humans we passed that we were looking for the wild dogs, but how did the hyenas know to distinguish our van from all the other ones? Either they followed our rattling van to the meat or had been waiting lazily for a random distraction.
The wild dogs went hungry due to my curiosity. Human interference makes unknown impacts. We noticed the hyenas because as a group of biologists-in-training, we collectively notice every stick bug and chameleon. But maybe every van interrupts natural behavior. Maybe every ecological experiment disrupts instead of protects. I never knew innocent intentions could be so cruel.
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